You know maxtor recently came out with a harddrive that you just hook up on a network cable and it acts like a shared drive. I thought that was pretty neat, and I was thinking if it would be possible to take my USB 2.0 drive enclosure and make a device that would read via the USB port on the drive, and then put it though a network cable like a shared drive as well. It sounds pretty tricky, but not impossible. One future addition I would like to try, is also intergrate a USB hub to the device, so that more drives and possibly printers could be hooked up to it for shareing as well. Now im sure someone is going to come and tell me not to reinvent the wheel, but it would be nice to have a device that can have alot more flexablity. Somments, suggestions in a courteous tone are welcome.

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orbitaudio

You could maybe avoid reinventing the wheel and get a lot more flexibility ... the Linksys NSLU2 is basically a tiny box that has 2 USB ports and an Ethernet port, for making your USB drives network-visible. The interesting thing is it runs Linux (although there's no way to tell that in normal operation) and there are a lot of people making custom firmware images for it: google for unslung and openslug. It's an ARM (Intel XScale) running at 133MHz (266 if you change a jumper) with 32MB of RAM. Costs about $80-$90 retail. Seems very hackable.